Wellbeing Blog

Where to start with workplace wellbeing

Do you assume to know the state of health and wellbeing within your organisation based on recording factors such as sickness absence? Or maybe you don’t record any statistics? The danger of making assumptions on either limited evidence or no evidence is that decisions about your organisations health & wellbeing may be directed the wrong way and potential benefit of any investment in this area could be limited.

What’s the value of health & wellbeing in the workplace?

There is a wealth of evidence and statistics that highlight the importance of understanding what impact the health and wellbeing of employees has on a workplace. According to CIPD’s 2015 Annual Absence Management Survey “Organisations that achieved their absence targets were significantly more likely to manage absence through promoting health and well-being than those that did not achieve their targets.” (source www.cipd.co.uk). In the same report “Just 8% of organisations have a stand-alone well-being strategy in support of their wider organisation strategy, while a fifth have a well- being plan/programme as part of their wider people strategy.”

There are few employers who would disagree that a healthy workforce has a positive impact on business outcomes e.g. productivity and growth.

But where do you start?

The challenge is to have the evidence to hand to show what the current health & wellbeing status of your organisation. A good place to start is to run a pilot project that will provide you with valuable insight, by contributing towards forming a future strategy with short, medium and long term measurable goals for creating a healthy, productive, engaged workforce and culture.

As part of a pilot project, your first step can be to run a Health & Wellbeing Survey, which will gather evidence on many aspects of a persons health & wellbeing. Collecting this anonymously will encourage and allow your employee’s to be honest with their responses.

How can Evolve help?

It doesn’t have to be complicated, we provide employee health & wellbeing surveys as a good place to start.

We facilitate a survey, working with you to distribute, gather and collate the results. A presentation of the results will be provided and we can then help you take the next step with building a strong case to take to senior managers / leaders that demonstrate the importance of having a wellbeing strategy that will contribute to future business plans.